Chapter 183 The Necklace
ADRIANA
I was afraid to ask the next question but I asked it anyway.
“How many children were in the facility when you left?”
Brianna thought about it carefully, which I appreciated. She was not the kind of person who gave approximate answers when she had precise ones.
“When I arrived there were thirty. By the time I left, it was closer to twenty five. Some had been released in the weeks before me. One at a time, never in groups.”
Thirty children. Twenty five are still there. From my pack, taken every month for the better part of a year, and I had known nothing about it until last week.
“Were they all from this pack?”
“We asked each other when the guards were elsewhere. Everyone I spoke to came from here. Some of them had been there six months or more.”
I sat with that. Six months. Some of these children had been sitting in a cold stone room for six months while their parents came to the palace gate and were turned away by a man who couldn’t be bothered, and I had been managing my powers and my twins and my role as Luna and had not known. I did not let the guilt settle into something unproductive because guilt without action was useless, but I felt it. I registered it. I was going to carry it appropriately.
“You said they brought in one boy recently. Near the end of your time there.”
She nodded.
“Tell me more about him.”
She looked at the window for a moment, reconstructing it.
“He has dark hair and was around my age, maybe a little older. He was different from the rest of us from the moment he arrived. He didn’t look frightened, though I think he was, but because he didn’t show it the same way. He looked around the room when they brought him in and I could see him counting things. Counting us, counting the guards, counting the exits.” She paused. “He spoke to the guards on our behalf almost immediately. Not aggressively. Just as if it was reasonable for him to be the one speaking and he expected them to respond accordingly.”
That was Leo. That was entirely Leo.
“The master — that’s what they called the man in charge — he came himself to collect the boy. I had only heard his voice before that. He took him somewhere else in the building and the boy came back after maybe an hour. He didn’t tell us what was said.” She looked at me directly. “But before I left, he helped me. He was the one who arranged it. He told me to pretend to be ill, told me exactly where to go once I was outside. He knew the route — he’d memorized it on the way in because he hadn’t been blindfolded.” She paused, like she was trying to remember more things. “He gave me something before I ran. He said to give it to whoever came to ask questions.”
Her mother, who had been sitting quietly, reached into the pocket of her apron and held something out to me.
It was a necklace, wooden-backed, with a small engraved disc. I recognized it before I had fully registered.
Elijah had received it as a birthday gift last year. Leo had chosen it himself, he’d spent three weeks deciding, and had presented it with the solemnity of someone who understood that gifts were a form of communication.
I turned it over.
Engraved into the back in small, careful letters: G.B.
Golden Blade.
My fingers closed around it.
“Did he tell you anything else?” My voice was steady. I was proud of it.
“He said — and I’m trying to remember the exact words — he said tell them I’m handling it. Tell them not to come in loud.” She met my eyes. “I didn’t know what it meant.”
I did.
I stood and gathered myself and thanked Brianna in the way that the moment deserved — not quickly, not as a formality, but with the full weight of what she had done by coming home and telling the truth and sitting across from me and giving me what she had.
“You’ll hear from me,” I told her. “Directly. Not through anyone else.”
She nodded. Her mother walked us to the door and I held the necklace in my closed fist the entire way back to the carriage.
Martine waited until we were moving before she spoke.
“That was the Prince, wasn’t it, Luna.”
“Yes.”
“He sent a message.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment, reading my face.
“He’s alright,” she said. Not a question. A conclusion she had drawn from watching me.
“He’s doing what he was trained to do,” I said. “He’s gathering information and protecting the other children and waiting for the right moment.” I looked out the carriage window at the pack moving past us in its ordinary afternoon rhythms. “I need to see Elijah. Immediately.”
“I’ll make sure he's told.”
I held the necklace and pictured my brave boy speaking up for frightened children he had never met because it was the right thing to do. Elijah had raised him to understand what right looked like even when right was expensive.
Something in me already knew that this was not simply a kidnapping. A part of me had been building toward a shape I couldn’t fully see yet.
We arrived at the palace and I went directly to the throne room where Elijah was finishing a report with two of the senior guards. He saw my face when I walked in and ended the meeting in three words and cleared the room.
I opened my hand and showed him the necklace.
He went very still.
“Where did you get this?”
“One of the missing children came home. She’s the one I went to see.” I waited while he processed it, watched his face do what it did when something significant was arriving and he was making space for it rather than reacting immediately. “Leo gave it to her. He helped her escape. He told her to tell us he’s handling it and not to come in loud.”
Elijah looked at the necklace for a long moment.
“Golden Blade,” Elijah said.
“Turn it over,” I said.
He did.
I watched him absorb everything, relief that Leo was alive and thinking clearly, the anger at where he was and how he had gotten there, and underneath both of those things a father who has been told his son is conducting himself with exactly the character he spent years trying to build.
He breathed out once.
“He said not to come in loud,” Elijah said.
“Yes.”
“So we don’t come in loud.”
“No.” I held his gaze. “We come in exactly as Leo has already prepared for. Not a moment before and not in a way he hasn’t anticipated.”
Elijah closed his fingers around the necklace.